What Hobbies have been Passed down to Me?

Can you have a mental hobby? Maybe a more fitting word for the actions passed down to me from my family would be a value set, or an interest. My dad’s “hobby” is caring about the environment, and my mom’s is caring about waste. I don’t mean to make it sound like my parents think about the environment for fun, but they have integrated their beliefs into our daily lives so thoroughly that I have internalized and adopted the same standards into my daily life too. The values that my parents hold have more than a mental effect on me, because our family has taken many steps to implement those morals and do our best to change the impact that we have on the environment.

My earliest memory of my mom teaching me how to become less wasteful was at the dinner table. She has a rule that we each serve ourselves, and therefore must finish the food on our plates, which creates less waste because the leftover food can be stored and eaten again at a later day. I still to this day feel ashamed when I waste food, and will generally avoid doing so at all costs. In fact, I have a negative reaction to feeling that I’m “wasting” anything, like throwing away paper plates or the shell of an avocado, because I know that it would have been better to use a reusable plate or I could have composted that avocado peel (as we do at our house). To be fair to her, my mom is actually not that strict about these things, and I am judging myself much harder than she would ever judge me. But the values that she has passed down have helped me understand the importance of eliminating waste through diligence, reusing, and recycling. 

While I’m sure many people have parents who tell the story “when I was younger I barely had any food to eat” or something along those lines to help their children understand why wasting food is bad, my dad’s interest may be more unconventional. As a retired particle physicist, he started studying energy physics his last few years as a professor and sought to make changes at the University of Illinois, like installing a solar field to partly power university buildings. At home, he successfully made changes as well. He started small by asking us all to turn off the lights as soon as we left a room, then we replaced all of our light bulbs with LEDs, then we got electric cars, then we started using solar panels to power our entire house (and two cars), and finally we switched our heating and cooling system to entirely geothermal. Not only was he making tangible changes to our house to reduce our impact on the environment, he also spent time educating my sister and I about why we were making these big changes, and especially how these solutions worked. My dad’s interest in renewable energy has encouraged my own interest, which is evident even in this English class because my I-Search essay topic is about the impact of glass on the environment. 

I realize that the changes my family has made to our house and our lifestyle are not feasible for many other families, but much like my mom, my dad has also made sure to emphasize the importance of changing small things. Some examples are: using reusable dishes, silverware, and straws, composting and recycling as much as possible, using LEDs to reduce energy consumption, and so on. That is part of the reason why I am so aware of my actions throughout the day, because the answer is not just putting up some expensive solar panels and forgetting about the rest, instead I’ve realized that we have to develop better habits and awareness of how we can change our everyday actions to better serve the environment.